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< Back Think Like a Bot “We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…” David Cowles On Friday, September 1, Aletheia Today Magazine will be releasing our Fall Issue dedicated exclusively to AI – its philosophical, theological, cultural, and spiritual implications. In researching material for this issue, I came across something terrifying online ( quelle surprise! ): “Prompt engineering involves more than just typing in a query. It's about understanding the AI's underlying logic…and sometimes even 'thinking like the AI'… (For example) Generate five innovative product ideas for the eco-friendly industry focusing on renewable energy." Why frightening? First, as human beings, we like to think that we create technology to serve our purposes; we bristle at the idea that it is technology that creates us. But over the past 10,000 years or so, it has become increasingly obvious that we are products of our own technique . According to Genesis, God created the world in 6 or 7 ‘days’ (or epochs); technology is creating us in a similar succession of stages. The first transformation occurred with the rise of spoken language. Originally invented to help us accomplish our projects, language has increasingly worked to determine the nature and scope of those projects. Imagine a Stone Age father lecturing his teenage son: “If you can’t say it, you can’t think it, and if you can’t think it, you can’t do it.” Perhaps surprisingly, our Stone Agers were not entirely unaware of their dilemma. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is an early, if somewhat confused, attempt to showcase the relationship between speech and act. Minimally, the story makes it clear that ‘saying and doing’ (language and production) are intimately related. Next came the invention of writing. It only happened once in human history, but like Pokémon, Kid Rock, and Pet Rock, it caught on. Written communication greatly expanded the scope of enterprise…but at the same time it further limited the scope of that enterprise. Imagine a Bronze Age mother lecturing her teenage daughter: “ If you can’t write it , you can’t say it, and if you can’t say it, you can’t think it, and if you can’t think it, you can’t do it.” Now technology is about what we can’t do rather than what we can. Our modern Indo-European (IE) languages are semantic minefields seeded over-generously with nouns (subjects & objects) and active voice verbs. If your project doesn’t fit comfortably within this syntactical framework, you’re S.O.L. That’s not a problem for you? Perhaps that is the problem! Have you lost the ability (or inclination) to conceive of a project outside the limits imposed by IE syntax? Writing kept us busy for several millennia. I mean come on, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Goethe! What more could anyone want? Then came the next great tectonic shift – the Industrial Revolution (IR). The technique involved in large-scale manufacture, and its impact on human life, has been identified by countless individuals and celebrated (or castigated) in various media. To cite just a few examples: Prudhomme, Marx, Legere, Chaplin, Brazil , McLuhan and Ellul. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, “Today, we measure out our lives with coffee spoons.” Following IR…DR, the Digital Revolution. Consider the massive change in communication that has occurred since ‘I’ invented the internet. E-mail, Text, Excel, PowerPoint have all changed the way we express our thoughts…and therefore how and what we think. Begin with the obliteration of orthography (spelling) and grammar, the atrophy of sentence structure, the disappearance of complex verb forms, and, of course, the rise of internet slang and emojis. We’ve witnessed the reduction of mathematics to spread sheeting and rhetoric to bullet points. When PowerPoint first came out, I was resistant. I didn’t like the oversimplification and non-sequiturs I noticed in others’ work products. I wouldn’t use it…until I couldn’t not use it. Now, of course, I use it every day. “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Now we appear to be riding on the first swell of another technological tidal wave: first language, writing, manufacture, computerization, and now…(drum roll please) Artificial Intelligence. All of which brings us back to what I found so terrifying : “…thinking like the AI.” We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential, of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…but that may be exactly what we’re doing…which leads me to my second concern: “Generate five innovative product ideas.” Talk about begging the question. Can AI truly innovate? That may be the dominant intellectual question of our time; but according to the quote at the beginning of this article, it’s already a settled matter of fact: AI can innovate! If so, we need to consider our Bots conscious …and therefore entitled to certain civil rights; if not, we need to consider how far we’ve dumbed-down our understanding of innovation . Implicit in ‘in/nova/tion’ is ‘novum’, new. Rearranging deck chairs is not new, but I don’t doubt that AI can do it brilliantly. That’s not the same thing as inventing a new, iceberg-proof hull. On the other hand, where do we draw the line? When does mere novelty become true innovation? Is there any fundamental difference? What a time to be alive! We are at the ‘question forming’ stage of a new anthropological era. Should aquatic organisms colonize dry land? The Iron Age is history; welcome to the Age of Bots. I can’t wait to see where we go from here! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Share Previous Next

< Back Be a Bee Why ‘milk and honey?’ Why not ‘sour grapes and corn mash?’ Turns out, it’s all about the honey! David Cowles I owe the better insights (below) to Rabbi Aharon Loschak of Brooklyn, N.Y. For those that are ‘not so good,’ I take full responsibility: Small businesses in the United States are increasingly organized as pass-through entities, i.e., they pass net business income straight to their owners or investors. (Marx’s worst nightmare!) As a result, only these individuals—and not the entity itself—are taxed on the revenues. 95 percent of U.S. businesses are pass-throughs, but this isn’t about tax codes! Toward the end of his days, Moses tells the Jewish people that they are about to enter the land promised to their forefathers (the Patriarchs) ... a land flowing with milk and honey. Why ‘milk and honey?’ Why not ‘sour grapes and corn mash?’ Turns out, it’s all about the honey! A bee’s primary function is to pollinate flowers, collect nectar, and make honey. It’s no exaggeration to say that honeybees make the world go round. On the other hand, honeybees are also famous for their stingers. Just ask any dad, two steps ahead of his own child, as both run out of the park, terror-stricken by a buzz. Parents tell their children that bees are largely harmless because they only use their stingers in self-defense. Unless they feel threatened, they will not strike first. Just stand still, mind your own business, and chances are you’ll be fine. Chances are …cold comfort indeed! But point taken: the bee is only concerned with making honey and will only use its stinger when something gets in the way of that goal. Like the bee, we are also tasked with collecting sweet things. Like the bee, we have a mission: assemble the materials of life, carefully ensuring that those materials are renewable, of course, and then build the City of Dioce ( Read " Ectaban " here. ) , i.e., make them into something luscious. Never forget who you are in the process of life. You are ‘bee,’ so ‘be bee’ with every ounce of your bee-ing! If something interferes with or threatens your mission, i.e., you, it may be stinger time …but only as an act of self-defense. Self -defense? Yup, your mission is who you are. You are what you were sent to do. Anything that threatens your mission threatens you. To defend your mission is to defend yourself. Notice I didn’t say, “defend your property.” Your property is not you! Your mission, on the other hand, is – it’s your seat in the world. Without property, you are still you; without a mission, you are not: Contendo ergo sum. You are, but you are in the context of an actual world. Your mission is your seat in that world. Without that seat, there is an unbridgeable chasm between you and the world…which means there is no you. So, defend your mission, defend yourself; build the city, make honey! (That’s the principle behind Judeo-Christian martyrdom…but let’s not go there …yet.) Consider the special place of honey in Jewish dietary practices: though it’s secreted from a non-kosher animal, it’s still kosher. This is in stark contrast to the rule that “all secretions from a non-kosher entity are also not kosher.” The Talmud explains that honey isn’t really a secretion from the bee’s body because the bee is a pass-through entity . As such, the honey retains its botanical quality and so is fit for kosher consumption. In other words, it’s not about you; it’s about your mission. You are on a mission and the fate of the created universe rests on that mission. You are obeying Kant’s Categorical Imperative: you do what all must do in order for all this to be all this. You are also honoring the message of St. Paul to the Christian community at Ephesus: “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.” (Eph. 2: 10) As with the calling of Jeremiah, God makes it clear that it’s all about the mission. First the mission, then the missionary. No missionary without a mission. The potential for ‘bumper-sticking’ is endless. All of this ties in with the question of identity, a persistent theme in ATM. “ Who are you ?” the Caterpillar asked. On one hand, you are Alice, a little girl with a very fertile imagination. On another hand, you are a bee, popping islands of honey (order) into an unbounded sea of disorder (entropy). Everything you think is you is not you: your body, your personality, your education, your possessions, your upbringing, etc. Everything you think is not you is you: how you transform the world, how you inject order into chaos, how you act as a missionary on behalf of the Kingdom of God. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Previous Next

< Back The Machiavellian Heresy David Cowles Sep 4, 2025 “We now accept what (Lewis) Carroll said in jest as a tolerably accurate description of the human condition.” Time is time but certain times seem denser than others. 1500 CE was such a time in Europe. 500 years earlier Sylvester II, the Polymath Pope, effected a ‘great convergence’, i.e. the unification of science, mathematics and theology. Christianity became the first TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) since Aristotle. But by 1500 the world was a very different place. The Renaissance was already in full swing in Italy and the Reformation was just about to break over Northern Europe. Columbus had ‘discovered America’, Savonarola had been executed, DaVinci had returned to his native Florence, and the public career of Niccolo Machiavelli was taking off. Unsurprisingly, we technophiles have a habit of naming historical periods for their emerging technologies: Stone Age, Iron Age, Industrial Revolution, Cyber Age, etc. Alternatively, we might label eras by their dominant ethical paradigms. Such a scheme would at a minimum distinguish three ‘period paradigms’: the Heroic ethics of the Classical Period, the Christian ethics of the Middle Ages, and today’s Pragmatic Relativism. We correctly trace Christianity back to Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus; similarly, we ought to connect Pragmatism with its greatest apostle, Machiavelli. Thanks to him, we take it for granted today that “ends justify means”. So much so that we don’t even notice it. Pragmatism is our oxygen. But a quick review of the New Testament turns up little evidence of this ethic in the teachings of Jesus: “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” Whatever Jesus meant by this, he did not mean that we should artificially impoverish ourselves in hopes of an eschatological reward. Jesus was no ascetic! And yet, in practice, we modernists often misinterpret the Beatitudes in just such a way. We romanticize poverty and the poor and we routinely practice self-denial as a spiritual exercise. Did it take 20th century Liberation Theology to convince us that poverty is the enemy of spiritual growth, not its topsoil? Of course, we don’t call ourselves ‘Machiavellians’; in fact, that term has become pejorative. Instead, we dress up Machiavelli as John Stuart Mill and send him out trick or treating on All Hallows Eve…in your neighborhood, not mine. We call our ‘newly discovered’ ethic ‘ Utilitarianism ’ - the greatest good for the greatest number. But in an earlier post , we pointed out that there is no such thing as ‘ends’ or ‘means’. In fact, Causality itself is a misnomer Ok, so I’m not in love with Machiavellianism; so what? Agree to disagree, live and let live, give peace a chance! Why throw a Heresy label on it? Heresy is closely aligned with its cousins, blasphemy and idolatry. Every heresy has two things in common: it misrepresents the nature of God and it delivers a distorted image of the Real World. Let me set the stage: you are thrown onto a deserted beach by a giant wave we call ‘being born’ (Heidegger). (Storks don’t deliver babies, dolphins do.) What do you most need now? How about a map? How about a friend? How about a friend who will help you interpret that map and navigate its territory? To paraphrase the Christian hymn: “We have such a friend in Jesus!” Or we did…until a ‘heretic’ handed us an inaccurate and distorted map and planted gossip in our minds so that we would fail to recognize or appreciate any would-be helpers. In the Wild West, stealing a horse was a hangin’ offense. Made sense too: without a horse a person was defenseless. Without a reliable map and a helpful friend, we are defenseless in our world. Hence a special rung of Dante’s Inferno is reserved for the Heretics. No less than Arianism, Docetism, and Gnosticism, Machiavellianism is a heresy. But unlike its predecessors, this more modern ‘error’ is alive and kicking in the halls of orthodox Christianity, even today. Whenever catastrophe strikes, there are always folks only too happy to sublimate the human suffering to some sort of mythical ‘divine plan’. “It’s God’s will,” is the scourge of every mourner. Has anything more horrendous ever been said about the Judeo-Christian Godhead? No intentional insult from Marx or Stalin could even come close! The idea that a benevolent God would ‘plan’ a world with this level of immediate suffering, where innocent babies can be burned alive, only provides fuel for antitheists. It lies at the heart of the Problem of Evil which understandably is the #1 reason cited by atheists (e.g. Bertrand Russell ) for their disbelief. Question: Is Fatalism (‘Divine Plan’) really any different from Gnosticism (‘Divine Script’)? To paraphrase Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-glass, “Bliss yesterday and bliss tomorrow, but never bliss today.” 150 years on, we now accept what Carroll said in jest as a tolerably accurate description of the human condition. The idea that time is a vector and that the future is always the preferred frame of reference (relative to the present and the past) is unique to the modern era and, in my view at least, entirely counterintuitive. The Past is ‘in the can’; it is ‘certain’ and presumably cannot now be altered: “I have suffered.” ☑ The Present is immediate, it’s what’s happening right now. ☑ But the Future is unknown, possibly unknowable, normally unpredictable, certainly uncontrollable, and infinitely contingent. Question: Why would I give more weight, much more weight, to a contingent Future at the expense of the immediate Present or the experienced Past? Answer: Machiavelli. It is an unidentified core assumption of Machiavellian ideology that all future frames of reference trump any present or past frame. How else could any end justify any means? Marcel Proust wrote the 20th century’s most important novel (lie quiet, Mr. Joyce) as a multi-volume assault on Machiavellian cosmology. Specifically, Proust showed that past events are just as real as present ones, maybe even more so. The future does not trump the past after all. The intensity of our experiences is unrelated to their sequence. While not explicitly formulated until the 16th century, the spirit of Machiavellianism has been with us since the beginning of recorded history. (Abraham and David were able to face their own personal deaths, fortified by God’s assurance that the Messiah would come from their descendants.) And it was alive and well at the time of Jesus, even among his closest disciples. At a feast in Bethany, a woman (sometimes identified with Mary Magdalen) broke a bottle of perfume over Jesus and anointed him with the oil. Some at the table murmured. According to Mark they were infuriated. The bottle of perfume was worth a year’s wages. Why not sell it and give the proceeds to the poor instead? (Mark 14: 3 - 8) These dissidents were using ‘future ends’ (the eradication of poverty) to evaluate ‘present means’ (the anointing of Christ); Jesus demurred: “The poor you will have always with you and whenever you wish you can do good to them, but you will not always have me.” Reversing the paradigm, Jesus was giving priority to the present over the future. More importantly, he was attacking the premise that current acts (sale of perfume) can intentionally and reliably cause future events (eradication of poverty). Jesus was also giving precedence to the symbolic and communicative power of an act of worship over the economic power of a commercial transaction. Selling perfume to fund charitable acts might (or might not) immediately benefit a selected few. Beyond that, consequences can neither be predicted, measured nor controlled. On the other hand, “Amen I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” (Mark 14: 9) In his handling of this ‘test’, Jesus combined the cynicism of a 1950’s Parisian existentialist with the optimism of a 21st century Seattle technophile. There are no causes or effects, no means or end, on the material level, but on the cyber level, information is indestructible. Note that Jesus does not say, “Ignore the poor.” He understands the material and spiritual benefits of charity, but he also understood that it was beyond the capability of his contemporaries to eradicate poverty. Worship, however, is an activity always available to anyone. It validates itself; its success is that it happened. Its Dasein is its Wassein. (Heidegger) And it happens entirely in the Present; it is its own means to its own end. It does not depend on anything outside itself, not even history, for its value. Eradicating poverty is a laudable, if perhaps immediately unachievable, objective but worshipping the Son of God is something anyone can do right here right now. And so he articulated the heart of Christian ethics: “Let her be. Why do you make trouble for her? She has done a good thing for me…She has done what she could.” (Mark 14: 6 – 8) Now be honest. The first time you heard this reading, did your sympathies go straight to Mary…or did you feel some affinity for the dissident disciples? Of course you did! (If you didn’t there’d be something wrong with you.) We are children of the so-called Enlightenment. We have learned to put the future ahead of the present, the practical ahead of the symbolic. We have learned to ‘defer gratification’; we even consider it a sign of adulthood. But we are wrong! We are Machiavellians, everyone…except maybe Tiny Tim. We learned ‘waste not, want not’ in the nursery; but for the most part, no one taught us to celebrate life. If we learned to do so later, it was often with a twinge of guilt. “How did it all turnout?” Did they live happily ever after? Our curiosity is insatiable. Good thing too or we’d have nothing to watch on PBS or BBC. How many books would Agatha Christie have sold if the answer to “Who done it?” was always the same: “Who knows, who cares?” A century ago, some folks dreamed of building a culture around the ideas of Karl Marx; but they were a bit late to table. The West had already built its culture - 400 years earlier - around the ideas of Niccolo Machiavelli. So again, why heresy? Because Machiavellianism distorts God’s values (future, present, charity, worship) and obscures the Real World behind a false veil of Causality. So, welcome to the 6th rung, Niccolo. But cheer up, thanks to the industrial culture you helped foster, we have invented something called ‘air conditioning’; I’ll make sure a unit gets installed right away inside your burning sarcophagus. I hope it provides cold comfort! (Get it, cold comfort?) *** "The Burning of a Heretic" by Sassetta is a panel from the San Francesco Altarpiece (c. 1430s) that depicts the dramatic execution of a heretic by fire, illustrating the triumph of the Franciscan faith over heresy. The scene reflects the religious and social tensions of the time, combining Gothic elegance with intense emotional expression to promote orthodox Catholic doctrine. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back AI, Justice, and Job “Can a Bot go beyond its programming and our inputs to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that exhibit Justice as their determinative Value?” David Cowles Our Fall Issue of Aletheia Today Magazine , our ‘AI Issue’ released 9/1/23, included an article titled, “ Do Bots Know Beauty? ” In that essay, we proposed that there are (at least) three transcendent values: Beauty, Truth, and Justice. We dealt, hopefully to your satisfaction, with Beauty and Truth, but we deliberately left Justice for another day (and that day is today ). Can a Bot be Just? This question has two parts: Can what we mean by ‘justice’ be reduced to an algorithm? Or if not, can a Bot go beyond its programming and our inputs to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that manifest Justice as their determinative Value? More so than Beauty, less so than Truth, Justice can be reduced to an algorithm. We call that algorithm ‘the law’; but then we criticize anyone who blindly follows it. We say they’re being overly legalistic . Like Solomon, we instinctively know that Justice is more than a legal code, no matter how well-intentioned or expertly drawn it may be. Justice is rooted in the ineffable. Aquinas, for example, says that secular law is normative… but only to the extent that it is consistent with God’s law. Dial 611. Call up the specific mitzvah of Torah; they represent an early effort to codify – or program – Justice. Now add the 2-general mitzvah, aka the Great Commandment, a recognition that the law must always be interpreted and applied in the broader context of Justice per se . Even so, it would be a huge mistake to treat Torah as an algorithm. In all cases, it requires interpretation and application by a competent Rabbi (Midrashim, Talmud). Even more importantly, during the period of the Judges , when God ruled Israel directly (through Torah), “everyone did what was right in their own eyes”. (Judges XX: SS) The justice of law is always mitigated by Justice as Value - justice as it is experienced and expressed in collective tradition and in personal conscience. More broadly, the history of Judeo-Christianity itself can be viewed as a dialectic of law and value. As Jewish theology evolved during the first millennium BCE, the migration of Torah from tablets of stone to hearts of flesh was a recurrent theme. When Christianity burst onto the scene (c. 30 CE) the dichotomy of law and value sharpened even further. Jesus said, “…Not an iota, not a jot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5: 18), but Paul wrote, “Now that faith (value) has some, we are no longer under the law.” (Galatians 3: 25) Of course, both are correct. The Christian project is the merger of Justice as Law with Justice as Value. But the dichotomy of Justice as Value vs. Justice as Law goes back much further than Jesus and Paul; it’s older than the Judges, and it’s even older than Moses himself. In fact, it goes all the way back to the story of Job , one of Western civilization’s oldest narratives. The version memorialized in the Biblical Book of Job could be aptly subtitled, Justice: Algorithm or Value? Refresher : Job, a just and prosperous man, suddenly hits a streak of ‘bad luck’ (to say the least): his family is wiped out, his wealth lost, his health destroyed. It is assumed, not without reason, that God is responsible for Job’s misfortunes. Unfortunately, Job is joined on his ‘dung hill’ by three so-called comforters, men of high standing who have traveled a great distance to commiserate with their colleague. These self-appointed divine surrogates defend the notion of Justice as Algorithm: they try to persuade Job that it is his ‘sins’ that have triggered this dreadful series of events. Job will have none of it. He insists that he has committed no sin remotely proportionate to his sufferings. Beyond that, Job contends that Justice is more than tit-for-tat, that it is a Value, not an Algorithm: judgement should be based on the totality, including subjective intent, not just on naked acts taken out-of-context. Our hero is so confident of his concept of Justice that he uses it to ‘call God out’ and what ensues is one of the fiercest battles in the history of playgrounds. Remember Ali-Forman, the Rumble in the Jungle ? A Forman win was considered so certain that some of Ali’s handlers wanted the fight called off. Instead, Ali sat on the ropes for 7 rounds and then in the 8th stepped out from the shadows and knocked Forman out with a single 5 punch volley. Remember God-Job, the Rumble in the Desert ? Same idea! Bystanders are offering 100-to-1 odds, and still the ‘Job line’ has no takers. Predictably, God shows up in a whirlwind calculated to terrify his accuser. For several chapters, God rants while Job whispers. God taunts Job for his comparative lack of accomplishments. He threatens Job with monsters, Behemoth and Leviathan. He puts Job on a par with ‘uninhabited grassland’. Job is cowed but not crushed; he stands his ground. In the end, seeing that he can’t intimidate Job, like all bullies, God gives up . He admits that he has been badly represented by his surrogates, and he concedes that Job has Justice on his side: Justice is a Value, not an Algorithm! So back to Bots. As with Beauty, if a Bot can reach this same conclusion (God’s) on its own, not relying solely on its programming or on our inputs, then that Bot may claim to be conscious...and I’ll support that claim. And if not…then it is just a very expensive, albeit very useful, hunk of inanimate, unconscious silicon. Stay tuned! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Share Previous Next

< Back LLMs and Language David Cowles Jan 9, 2024 “The written word itself is a form of AI…it’s been around for about 10,000 years.” We devoted the Fall 2023 Issue of Aletheia Today Magazine to the implications of Artificial Intelligence for philosophy, theology, culture, and spirituality. We regard the rise of AI as one of the defining events of our era, but we need to view it in context, lest we create another Golden Calf. Recent work by Yiu, Kosoy, & Gopnik reported in Perspectives on Psychological Science does a good job of putting things in perspective: “In its current state of development, AI relies on so-called Large Language Models (LLMs) to decode reality.” So, how are LLMs like (or unlike) everyday Language? How does Artificial Intelligence compare with Native Intelligence?” “Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often depicted as sentient agents poised to overshadow the human mind. But AI lacks the crucial human ability of innovation… While children and adults alike can solve problems by finding novel uses for everyday objects, AI systems often lack the ability to view tools in a new way…” “AI language models like ChatGPT are passively trained on data sets containing billions of words ( Large Language ) and images produced by humans. This allows AI systems to function as a ‘cultural technology’ similar to writing that can summarize existing knowledge…but unlike humans, they struggle when it comes to innovating…” (italics mine) “Instead of viewing these AI systems as intelligent agents like ourselves, we can think of them as a new form of library or search engine. They effectively summarize and communicate the existing culture and knowledge base (back) to us.” Hmm, ‘they effectively summarize and communicate the existing culture and knowledge base to us’…like all technology! What is that ‘vast wasteland’ (Newton Minow) known as television other than an idealized reproduction of everyday life? And with rare exceptions, the same may be said of contemporary theater, film, and popular music. Roland Barthes referred to media as "mythologies,” while Jacques Ellul went further and labeled media’s products, “propaganda." But according to 20th-century philosopher Jacques Derrida, these concerns reflect the nature of all language per se , especially written language. Homer’s epics organized and reported back to Achaeans the collective knowledge of his time, but it was plastic. Because it was oral literature, it was subject to modification over time and place and from bard to bard. Homer’s epics were cultural records, but they were living cultural records. As with a $500 bottle of vintage wine, breaking the seal freezes the product in the moment and kick-starts its gradual but inexorable deterioration. We drink wine ‘at the hour of its death’. A written manuscript is like a corkscrew; we can drink no wine before or after its time. Then Guttenberg’s printing press came along and ushered in intellectual history’s version of the ‘screw-top era’. The written word itself is a form of AI…and it’s been around for about 10,000 years. Yiu, Kosoy, & Gopnik compared the performance of various AI systems against that of children (ages 3 to 7) and adults. 88% of children and 84% of adults were able to pick, out of a group of objects, the two that would “go best” together. 85% of children and 95% of adults were also able to repurpose everyday objects (innovate) to solve novel problems. Wait! So children (3 to 7) outperformed adults on the mix-and-match test? Yup! It’s like we’ve always said here at AT, “ Children are smarter than you; deal with it .” Then, Yiu & Co. tested five popular AI systems on the same tasks. No model outperformed either the children or the adults in either test! On object pairing, the models ranged from a low of 59% to a high of 83%. But on the innovation test, AI scores ranged from a low of 8% to a high of 75%. So, it’s children: 1, adults: 1, AI: 0. “Children can imagine completely novel uses for objects that they have not witnessed or heard of before…,” Yiu said. “Large models have a much harder time generating such responses.” In a related experiment, most children were able to figure out how a new machine worked just by experimenting and exploring. But when the researchers gave the same problem set to selected LLMs, AI failed miserably. AI relies on statistically predicting linguistic patterns; so do you! That’s why it’s so difficult for you to converse in a foreign language, even if it’s familiar: you don’t have enough experience with the language to be able to predict its phonetic sequences. That’s why people speaking foreign languages seem to be talking much faster than you. But sorry, AI, statistically predicting linguistic patterns is not enough to generate new discoveries about the world. “AI can help transmit information that is already known, but it is not an innovator,” Yiu said. “These models can summarize conventional wisdom, but they cannot expand, create, change, abandon, evaluate, and improve on conventional wisdom in the way a young human can.” “The development of AI is still in its early days, though, and much remains to be learned about how to expand the learning capacity of AI,” Yiu said, adding: “Taking inspiration from children’s curious, active, and intrinsically motivated approach to learning could help researchers design new AI systems that are better prepared to explore the real world.” Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 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< Back Barry Goldwater David Cowles Jun 11, 2024 “When people show you who they are, believe them.” – Maya Angelou If you’re not as old as me – how could you be? – you might not remember Barry Goldwater, Senator from Arizona (1953 – 1987) and Republican nominee for President (1964). You may be forgiven. While we are used to presidential elections being decided by margins of less than 3%, Goldwater managed to lose by 23%. After a bruising but successful primary campaign, Senator Goldwater walked into San Franciso’s ‘Cow Palace’, buoyant with optimism, preparing to proclaim a new era in American history. Goldwater brought the convention to its feet with a message that will live forever in the annals of political rhetoric: Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice… Moderation is the pursuit of Justice is no virtue! The nation’s founding documents celebrate as divinely conferred the rights to ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’. Nowhere in these documents will you find reference to any qualifiers, such as: … But don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs (Don’t mess with success…or Texas), And never, ever tip over a money changer’s applecart. Yet, since the Gilded Age, the Populist critique of US culture has focused on the ‘extra-constitutional’ role of the State in the preservation of the socio-economic ‘status quo’ ( aka ‘inequality’). It’s ok to nibble around the edges with various schemes of social reform, designed to shore up support for the system ; but it’s ok only to the extent that such lofty ideals don’t compromise society’s actual guiding principles, as personified by money changing geese. Somehow, Goldwater missed the memo! Taking a page straight out of Jesus’ revolutionary handbook ( aka the Gospels), he strode into San Francisco’s Cow Palace and proclaimed a Jubilee (i.e. a redistribution of economic power)…this time in America. I said earlier that Goldwater’s electrifying speech brought the Republican Convention to its feet. I neglected to mention that about 1/3rd of these feet were headed for the exits. As soon as the Senator delivered his iconic lines, Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York and subsequently US VP, led a delegate walk-out. From that point on, Goldwater’s candidacy was effectively doomed. We didn’t realize it at the time, but he would never fully recover from Rockefeller’s bovine theatrics . But what’s interesting here is not so much the vagaries of U.S. presidential politics, but the unstated, yet clearly implied, ideology of the peripatetic dissenters: Liberty should be defended… And Justice should be pursued, Both in moderation. “When people show you who they are, believe them” – Maya Angelou. By their actions, Rocky’s Roadsters (and the many others who doomed the Goldwater campaign) betrayed what was most literally a pact with the devil. How so? Liberty and Justice, along with Beauty and Truth, are Divine Values. They constitute God’s essence. They’re what it’s like to be God. While these values are often compromised in our everyday lives, such compromises can never be ‘justified’. Call them what they are: ‘accommodations at the expense of Liberty and Justice’. 1964 saw the public proclamation of a new, apparently successful, social ethic. Liberty and Justice were ‘reclassified’ as preferred states of affairs rather than absolute imperatives. They are now just two factors, among many others, to be considered in the formation of public policy. ‘Liberty & Justice’ (Goldwater ’64) must never be allowed to replace ‘Peace & Prosperity’ (Eisenhower ‘52). Is this ringing any bells? Does it call to mind any other times in the life of this nation when absolute Liberty was considered too extreme and true Justice could only be pursued incrementally ? Abolitionism in the 1850’s? Civil Rights in the 1960’s? Today, we are so obsessed with the vilification of all things ante-bellum that we miss some key points. Pro-slavery politicians weren’t against either Liberty or Justice per se – far from it! They simply believed that these Values needed to be ‘understood in context’ and ‘realized gradually’. True, we cannot reasonably expect total Liberty or perfect Justice prior to the Eschaton. However, that does not relieve us of our responsibility to advocate and defend these values without compromise. There is no Scriptural or Constitutional sanction for any waiver . Torah does not say, “You shall not kill unless it is convenient.” So what’s the upshot of our little morality play: Goldwater’s campaign crashed and burned, as noted, and the country descended into a second civil war. But Phoenix (Arizona, get it?) rose from the ashes. In 1980 Ronald Reagan, who had played an important role in Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, was elected president – in a landslide! In fact, 1980 nearly flipped ‘64 on its head. And whatever you may think of President Reagan, you will agree that the country has not been the same since. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Things Are Not Always the Way They Seem to Appear David Cowles Jul 19, 2022 This alternative turns a simple, two-stroke process of alienation into a four-stroke process of alignment. How so? "Things are not always what they seem ,” you’ve heard it a million times, and it certainly is true…as far as it goes. It captures the separation of Being and Appearing, traditional in Western philosophy from Parmenides ( Aletheia vs. Doxa ) through Heidegger ( Dasein vs. Wassein ). But it also suggests that there is an almost primordial conflict between being (‘thing’) and appearing (‘experience’). Many years ago, I heard this same basic concept formulated in a way I like much better: “Things are not always the way they seem to appear.” This alternative turns a simple, two-stroke process of alienation (above) into a four-stroke process of alignment (below). How so? We start with things as they are , not as they seem to be to each other, not as they appear to be to an outside observer, but things as they are to each other, islands in the stream . Groups of things can form; call them ‘multiplicities.' Things in a multiplicity don’t necessarily have to fit together and very often they don’t. It would be more accurate to say that things in a multiplicity have a habit of frequently bumping into one another. Things are , they seem , and as we shall soon see, they appear . But before they can do any of this, things need to transform from mere multiplicities into nexus (pl.). Things cannot ‘seem’ on their own. ‘Seeming’ lies between ‘being’ and ‘not-being’ or between ‘being’ and ‘appearing.' ( Side bar : does that mean that ‘non-being’ and ‘appearing’ are the same thing? Check out Shakespeare’s Tempest for some ideas on this.) Seeming can be a bit, well, for want of a better word, ‘unseemly.' Seeming is a social act and, therefore, requires a collective subject (i.e., a nexus). Seeming connects the solidary act of being with the communal act of appearing. Seeming is fundamental to nexus. How a nexus ‘seems’ defines what that nexus ‘is.' Likewise, only a nexus can ‘seem’ so whatever ‘seems’ is a nexus. This is what is meant by ‘the way they seem:' it is a single act but with two opposite aspects. The ‘way’ is how things come together to form nexus (pl.) while the ‘seem’ is how the fully formed nexus projects itself in the world. Finally, things ‘appear.' Whew! It’s been a long ride, but yes, you can finally say it, “We’re there now.” Appearing implies an audience: ‘Tom Jones is now appearing in Las Vegas.’ He wouldn’t be ‘appearing’ if there wasn’t at least the expectation of one tapped out gambler as an audience. So, yes, we’re home now. The fat (sic) lady has sung! A ‘bud of experience’ (William James) has emerged from an undifferentiated background pool of potentiality. We have what Alfred North Whitehead would call, ‘an actual entity.' Let’s retrace our steps. We started with things in themselves, solitary things, strangers in the night. Then we looked at the way those things come together to form a nexus. A nexus is the first step in seeming . The process climaxes in what we call an experience . The experiencing agent interacts with the nexus in question thereby transforming the nexus’ seeming into appearing , the contribution of the nexus to the experience. Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Pronouns David Cowles Next time someone asks you for your ‘pronouns,’ try telling them, ‘you/you’…see what happens. I hadn’t thought much about the English language pronouns since third grade; now it seems I think of little else. Suddenly, the lowly pronoun is uppermost in everyone’s mind, be they eight…or 80. For more than a decade now, ‘they/them’ has been gradually replacing ‘she/her,’ ‘he/him,’ and ‘it.’ If this trend succeeds, and to a large extent it already has, English will lose distinctions of gender (M, F, N) and of number (S, P). Apparently, ‘case distinctions’ (they/them) will be retained. I said ‘case distinctions,’ not ‘class distinctions;’ but wait! Will “they/them” make it into the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies? Or will it become another one of the many markers we use to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them?’ Eliza Doolittle was permanently excluded from the upper rungs of English society because of her accent, that is, until Henry Higgins came along and ‘fixed it.’ Thanks to the good professor, aided no doubt by the post-war ubiquity of television, accent is no longer reliable in the service of our deeply treasured, if much maligned, ‘snap judgments.’ Regrettable because there is no knowledge quite so satisfying as a good stereotype confirmed! I mean, “How am I supposed to know how to treat someone if I don’t know what social class they belong to?” It’s quite a dilemma! Well, you know, you’re posh . Will the pronoun war be co-opted by our social gatekeepers to keep old barriers in place…or even rebuild them where they’re worn with age and misuse? Only time will tell…but back to the task at hand. This is not the first time that our attention has been directed toward the lowly pronoun. 100 years ago, existentialist philosopher and Jewish theologian Martin Buber focused on the distinction between “I – Thou (you)” and “I – It” relationships, the latter appropriate for certain interactions with the ‘inanimate world,’ the former more appropriate to human relationships. Self-explanatory? But the problem comes when I impose an “I – It” structure onto an “I – Thou” opportunity. Ideally, my relationships with ontological equals will always be of the “I – Thou” sort…but of course, they’re not. Unfortunately, most of us do not have “I – Thou” relationships with our grocers, for example. Yet, most of us would accept the proposition that ‘grocers’ are our ontological equals. In fact, most of us today are comfortable with the idea that all (or almost all) human beings are our equals. This was not always so. Until very recently, in fact, it was entirely acceptable to consign other tribes, other races, other nationalities, etc. to an ontological level inferior to our own: “They’re not really human.” While the founding fathers were building a society “with liberty and justice for all,” they were also reinforcing the institution of slavery. In order to reconcile these apparently exclusive priorities, the southern slaveholders had to separate the concept of ‘slave’ from the concept of ‘all humans.’ Implicitly, or even explicitly, they dehumanized and reified their slaves. Slavery is a paradigm of ‘I – It’ relatedness. Commonwealth is, at least arguably, a paradigm of ‘I – Thou.’ But to quote the immortal Cars, “You can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong,” and sure enough, 75 years later, the institution of slavery was on the ropes: the institution, not its hateful legacy. Reification is like skunk: once it’s in the fabric, it’s almost impossible to get out. Buber challenges us to expand the ‘Universe of Thou.’ It’s not just our kids, our spouses, our Higher Power, as many of us would prefer. It’s the guy across the street, the woman on life support, the homeless family…you know the drill. Implicit in Buber, and empowered by our reluctantly expanded collective consciousness, is the call to push the envelope of ‘ontological parity’ (or ‘congruence:’ I’m not insisting on pure equality here) beyond the species barrier. What about sea mammals? Apes? Pets? What about bees…and forests? I could go on. (“Please don’t!”) What do Hasidic Jews and Native Americans have in common? They both live in an enchanted world. For them, and others, the earth, the entire universe in fact, is ‘Thou:’ a living entity for us to nurture and enjoy…not injure and destroy. Sticking with Buber’s terminology, we have an opportunity to have an ‘I – Thou’ relationship with the Universe, through its creator and through each and every entity in it. But most of us don’t come close to realizing this potential. We take the so-called inanimate world for granted and guiltlessly rape it to satisfy our own immediate needs. We carefully cultivate plants and husband livestock, but only so that we can harvest and slaughter them down the road. Worst of all, though, we allow the poison of ‘I – It’ to seep into relationships with our fellow human beings, even those closest to us. 100 years on, I suspect that society is no better positioned today on the ‘It – Thou’ scale than it was when Buber started writing. And yet, Buber didn’t go nearly far enough. Traditionally, English has distinguished pronouns according to three ‘persons’ and two ‘numbers’ (singular/plural): I, me, we, us (‘I’ for our purposes); You, including thou and thee (‘you’); He, she, or it (‘it’). Both of Buber’s dyads begin with the pronoun, ‘I;’ but that ‘I’ is only stable as a placeholder, a catalyst. Implicit in the concept of ‘I – Thou’ is the potentiality for reciprocity. Of course, we all know about ‘unrequited love;’ but even then, the possibility of reciprocity remains, albeit unrealized. That’s what makes these situations so tragic. A fully developed ‘I – Thou’ relationship must also be ‘Thou – I’. A reciprocal ‘I – Thou’ relationship is really a ‘Thou – Thou’ relationship. In the context of that relationship, I am because you are, and you are because I am. We are two ‘thees’ in a pod. When I enter into an “I – It” relationship with another entity (human, sentient or otherwise), I immediately preclude the possibility of reciprocity. I have substituted an active voice vector for the middle voice resonance arrow of ‘I – Thou.’ The communication is all one way, and when I relate to an entity in a way that precludes reciprocity, then I make myself inert, I turn ‘me’ into ‘it.’ So, whether it’s ‘I – Thou’ or ‘I – It’, the ‘I’ is unstable in every relationship. As soon as ‘I’ comes in contact with any potential relatum , it decomposes like a subatomic particle into either a ‘Thou’ or an ‘It.’ ‘I’ is the still coherent wave function in Quantum Mechanics: it decoheres ‘on contact’ to become a ‘Thou’ or an ‘It.’ This is an admittedly ‘off label’ use of C.S. Lewis’ notion of the “Great Divorce.” We are all living in two worlds, not one. One world is a world populated only by ‘It(s),’ the other only by ‘Thou(s).’ While the two worlds are entirely coincident, they do not interact. They are ships passing in the night. Between these coincident worlds, there lies an infinitesimal, non-orientable membrane (called the ‘Sea of Green’ in the Beatles’ 1968 movie, Yellow Submarine ). ( Read "Yellow Submarine Part II" here. ) When we pass from the ‘It – It’ universe to the ‘Thou – Thou’ universe, we pass from Liverpool to Pepperland (in the movie) and from ‘this world’ to the Kingdom of Heaven. ‘Thou – Thou’ relationships, to the extent that we can foster them on earth, are a foretaste of eternal life. This is precisely the state of affairs we long for when we pray, “on earth as it is in heaven.” Challenge : Next time someone asks you for your ‘pronouns,’ try telling them, ‘you/you’ or even ‘thou/thou;’ see what happens and let us know. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

< Back Out of the Mouths of Bots “Our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: Life is absurd…” David Cowles It is generally the position of this author that for most of us, useful life ends at about age 14. After that, it’s pretty much a matter of running out the clock. By then, that unique genius born of the combination of two (hopefully unrelated) sex cells has become ‘just like everyone else’. But prior to that? No thinking machine in the known universe can compare! Ask any three year old a question they may not have heard before. The probability of a creative, mind-bendingly novel answer is high. That probability declines unevenly but inexorably up to about age 14 at which point our subjects’ answers would presumably differ little from the culturally curated adult norm. Born as we are in the image of God, society remakes us into its own desiccated likeness. Recently, some researchers asked an intriguing question. What would happen in the case of an LLM (AI) whose ongoing training is based solely on its own output? We’ve all known someone like this, someone who stops listening to others, My spouse wants to know if this part is autobiography. In any event, the same information is being endlessly recopied. In such a scenario, we would expect that the crispness and the fidelity of each iteration would decline relative to its immediate predecessor and, of course, relative to the original. In fact, this happens! After a certain number of feedback loops, a string of hand written digits becomes indecipherable. But when we apply the same technique to more ‘humanized input’, something much more exciting happens. Researchers asked a normally trained LLM for instructions on cooking a Thanksgiving dinner. The initial output is just what you’d expect, it’s delicious I’m sure, but as you continue to feed that output back into the algorithm, things get weird. At first, the LLM ‘hallucinates’ some bizarre combinations of ingredients and cooking techniques. I’ll spare you the gory details; suffice to say, this is not a T-Day dinner I’d ever want to eat. But after a certain number of reps, the mood shifts. As if realizing that it is drifting ever further from the mark, the LLM ‘kicks it up a notch’: “To cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, you need to know what you are going to do with your life.” (Pause) What the heck! What’s going on here? Well, to start with, any or all of the following… Our LLM was ‘born’ self-aware and has learned to be self-critical. Our LLM can see to the end of a sequence of tasks, assess the value of the result, decide whether or not to complete that task, and if necessary, execute a STOP! order on its own authority. Our LLM can generalize from its own experience to propositions that apply more or less universally. I programmed the machine to run 61,243 iterations of every problem and spit out a Chinese fortune on the 61,244th. And what of the message itself: “To cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, you need to know what you are going to do with your life?” Our bot has become introspective. Its focus has shifted away from the concrete task of preparing a high quality dinner to question the source of all value and meaning. Our bot discovers the deep nature of the external world by examining the world’s reflection in the bot’s own internal space. Any event, X, gets its meaning and value, neither from its causes and/or motives nor from its objectives and/or consequences. Telos is not the consequence of events; it is their cause. We are used to understanding entities etiologically; now we’re being asked to understand them teleologically. It isn’t over until the ‘full bodied’ performer sings. Explaining events in terms of their proximate causes always invites the question of ultimate causes (first causes). Likewise, explaining events in the context of their proximate ‘consequences’ invites the question of ultimate consequences (eschatology). In essence our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: “Life is absurd, i.e. it is impossible to provide an objective, causal model that adequately accounts for events as they occur IRL.” Last century, this insight came from multiple directions: Picasso, Heisenberg, Camus, Godel & John Bell. AI (above) lifts this realization out of the realm of pure75 theory by demonstrating it algorithmically. Working at the speed of Nvidia, an LLM can play the ‘game of life’ until it is obvious that there can be no winner. The 19th century paradigm leads nowhere; it can’t. Smartly, our bot looks for a new approach. Biography studies the calcification of neural plasticity over time – the aging process. As a current TV ad emphasizes, we are all becoming our parents – just what the world does not need from us right now. Dare we hope that AI might reverse this process? That it will guide us through the inconsistencies of the standard model and restore to us some measure of the neuroplasticity characteristic of early childhood? Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Share Previous Next

“…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.” < Back Christology 101 David Cowles May 29, 2022 “…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.” St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians (the congregation at Colossae, east of Ephesus in Asia Minor) includes a very old Christological Hymn (1: 15-20), possibly the earliest liturgical Christology extant. It forms the basis of a complete Theology and a complete Cosmology: "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation , for in him all things were created… “All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together … “He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" Can we peel back the leaves of this artichoke? What are the essential elements of Paul's Christology as reflected in Colossians and why is this Christological formulation so important in the development of Christian theology? First, the elements: He (Christ) is the (visible) image of the invisible God . God is insensible, but Christ is the sensible image of God. (He is) the first born of all creation . Creation (Genesis and/or Big Bang) is the moment of minimal entropy (maximal order). Christ is maximal order, the ordering principle, and order per se ( logos ). He is before all things . Christ is universal and eternal. Therefore, Christ is an element in every world from which novelty emerges. Christ conditions all things. All things were created in him, through him, and for him . Christ is the locus of whatever is (was or will be). Christ is the origin of whatever is (its efficient cause). Christ is the destiny of whatever is (its final cause). In him all things hold together Because all things (events) share a common origin and a common destiny (Christ), all things hold together; and because Christ is also the locus of all events, all things hold together in him. He is the beginning, the first born from the dead. Death is the moment of maximal entropy, minimal order. Whatever emerges from maximal entropy must (by definition) manifest an incremental increase in order . Christ is the source of all order, and order per se , so whatever emerges from a state of maximal entropy (death) manifests Christ. In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him. Christ is not just the sensible image of an insensible God; Christ is God. ("In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell.") Entropy in the spatiotemporal world steadily increases due to conflict. Outside of spacetime (i.e. in Christ), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes (for Christ) order-eroding conflicts into order-enhancing contrasts. According to this Cosmology, without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night. There is no inherent reason why 'actual entities' should interact with one another, exhibit togetherness, mutually modify, or reconcile. Unlike 'birds of a feather,' things merely grouped together do not necessarily 'flock' together. Interactivity is needed and interactivity requires shared elements. But all things do hold together, and because they hold together, they do modify each other; and because they modify each other, they reconcile with one another, all through Christ, in Christ and for Christ. Christ, then, is the answer (the only answer?) to the ‘anti-isms’: solipsism, skepticism, nihilism. If A is an element of B and A is an element of C, then B and C are mutually interactive. Because they share an element in common (A), B and C are able to engage in a process of mutual modification and harmonization, ultimately leading to reconciliation: B and C reconcile via A. Christ (A) is an element of every entity…twice. Christ is the common origin and the common destiny, the Alpha and the Omega , of everything that is. That commonality constitutes the Solidarity of the World. But how? The origin and destiny of an event would be the same if the event were circular – if the event ended up restoring the status quo ante . In that case, however, the event in question could only be a virtual event , i.e. a ‘difference’ that makes no difference. According to Colossians , Christ is a real event and real events, by definition (Whitehead), make a difference; therefore real events cannot be circular. The World is a process of perpetual ‘advance’. You can’t step into the same river twice (Heraclitus). When an event is ‘circular’, it’s time factor (t) = 0. Therefore, it is not ‘real’ in spacetime; it’s a mathematical fiction. Like a line or a plane in geometry; it is a ‘virtual’ event. But this leaves us in a pickle: How can an event not be circular if its Alpha = its Omega ? The Christian doctrine of Incarnation provides a solution ( the solution?). Incarnation turns Being inside out. Destiny becomes origin and origin becomes destiny, yet they remain distinct. Think about a sock. You go to put it on. You try to push your foot through the mouth down to the toe. It won’t go. Someone is playing silly buggers; they’ve turned your sock inside out! The toe is where the mouth was and vice versa. The toe and the mouth have swapped places; yet they remain distinct. Also, a cacophony of protruding knots has replaced the lovely argyle patten you picked out in the shop. Now think about Kosmos . Incarnation turns the World inside out. The whole is its own quantum element. Bertrand Russell notwithstanding, this set ( Kosmos ) is an element of itself. The origin, locus, aim, and apex of the creative process enters that process directly…as an historical event. Of course, this ensures that Kosmos is non-linear and recursive; it modifies itself. Destiny ( Parousia ) is Origin (Nativity). Christ, the only begotten of the Father, not made, is the first of the living; Christ, resurrected, is the first-born of the dead. The first-born of the dead is the same, and not the same, as the first of the living. Christ is the overarching pattern of creation and salvation, outside of spacetime. Jesus reflects and reiterates, fractal like, that pattern in the historical life of a single human being. The child born in Bethlehem is the same, and not the same, as the man crucified outside Jerusalem 33 years later, who is the same and not the same as the one “through whom all things were made… (and who) is seated at the right hand of the Father.” ( Nicene Creed ) Every 'novel event' includes the Christ-event (Incarnation) as one of its elements, but the Christ-event is also the whole that includes all events. So every event, including the Christ-event, is part of the whole, but that whole is also a part of itself (Incarnation). Kosmos spirals! Necessary and/or Sufficient? Is Paul’s non-linear cosmology sufficient to account for the existence of a Kosmos like ours? We know that there is a Kosmos because we participate in it. Cogito, ergo est. The defining features of our World are Novelty, Intensity, and Solidarity. Does Paul adequately account for the existence of a Kosmos defined by these key features? If a theory does indeed account for the phenomena in question, we say that it is sufficient . Sufficiency is the first test of any model. If it isn't sufficient, "Forget about it!" But the Holy Grail of model builders is not 'sufficiency' but 'necessity.' A model is necessary if it is the only model that can account for the phenomena in question. So, what can we say about the model presented in Colossians ? Is it sufficient? Can it account for Novelty, Intensity, Solidarity? Can it pass the easy test ? According to Colossians , all things were created in, through, and for Christ - Novelty ; in him all things hold together – Solidarity - and through him all things are reconciled – Intensity . So, yes, Colossians passes the easy test , the test of sufficiency; but what about the hard test , the test of necessity? Is it the case that only Paul’s model can account for a World characterized by Novelty, Intensity, and Solidarity? Of course, I can create a different model using different words that is still sufficient , but would that new model be unique, or would it just be Colossians …re-dressed a la mode ? Put it another way, can I (or you, or anyone) come up with a model that is still sufficient to account for our target phenomena but that cannot be mapped onto the Colossians' model? If the answer is, "No," then the Colossians' model is necessary as well as sufficient, and the author of Colossians (Paul) may be said to have found the modelers' Holy Grail. So, have they? Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! 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< Back Quark Soup David Cowles “I once filled the entire universe, but for less than a second. I am 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, but I am still a liquid. I am denser than anything in the universe, except a black hole, but I flow 20 times more easily and smoothly than water. Who am I?” Do you like riddles? Try this one: “I once filled the entire universe, but for less than a second. I am 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, but I am still a liquid. I am denser than anything in the universe, except a black hole, but I flow 20 times more easily and smoothly than water. Who am I?” Give up? I’m Quark Soup! But what the heck is that? All the objects in our world are made of atoms. Each atom consists of a nucleus and a bunch of electrons (ok, at least one electron) surrounding that nucleus. The nucleus of an atom is made of protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons are made up of quarks: three quarks each to be exact. Quarks stick together…but not necessarily by choice. They are held together by a very strong kind of superglue called a gluon (glue-on, get it?). But gluons work differently from any glue you’ve ever used. When the quarks are just hanging out peacefully inside a proton or neutron, the gluons don’t do much; however, if one quark tries to break loose from the others, the gluons swing into action. They tug tightly on that quark so it can’t escape. The more the quark tries to pull away, the tighter the gluon tugs on it. Gluons are so strong that there is no way for a quark to escape from a proton or neutron…unless you heat it up to four trillion degrees (4,000,000,000,000º C). Only at that temperature (sometimes written 4 x 10¹², meaning 4 with 12 zeros after it) can quarks break gluons’ grip to form Quark Soup. So, where can I go to sample this rare gastronomic treat? You’d need to rent a time machine, but if you point your time machine at the center of the universe as it was 13 billion years ago, you’ll find yourself, quite literally, ‘in the soup.’ You’ll have to calibrate your time machine very, very accurately, though. Your target is a fraction of a second, 13 billion years ago. If you want Quark Soup, you’ve got to ‘stick’ the landing. Ok, that sounds annoying! How about I travel to the center of the sun instead? I hear there are some fabulous restaurants there, but no, sorry, you’re out of luck there too: the center of the sun is a mere 40,000,000º C – we’re still five zeros short. You have a better chance of getting a frozen popsicle on the sun than you have of getting Quark Soup. Let’s recap : You’re craving Quark Soup, but there’s literally nowhere in the universe you can go to get it, at least not now! You can either travel back 13 billion years…or you can make it yourself! The recipe is super easy, and the ingredients are relatively cheap, though the ‘pots and pans’ you’ll need for this recipe could be a bit pricey. Recipe : The nuclei of two gold atoms, two miles of tubing and some very powerful magnets. Insert the nuclei into the tube and use the magnets to accelerate the nuclei through that tube. When you get the nuclei up to a speed almost equal to the speed of light, use the magnets to make them crash into one another, head-on. Bang, you’ve got the temperature you need for Quark Soup! Once upon a time, but only for a fraction of a second, the whole universe was Quark Soup. Long before the end of that first second, the soup disappeared and has never since existed anywhere in the universe…except once on Long Island (NY); of course, where else? In 2010, at a place called Brookhaven, scientists finally freed quarks from their 13 billion year bondage! They built something called a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC for short) – this is the costly part. They followed the recipe (above) exactly (using 1,740 powerful magnets) and guess what? It worked! They ‘created’ Quark Soup on Long Island. So, if you can’t get enough time off from work or school to go back to the center of the universe 13 billion years ago, perhaps you could make it to Long Island, a dozen or so years ago. Even so, this seems like a lot of trouble to go through for a drop of soup: what’s this soup like, anyway? What makes it soooo special? Well, for one thing, it’s hot, very, very hot, 4 x 10¹²º C hot, but it’s still a liquid: ‘ Quark Soup don’t boil!’ And what a liquid! It pours at least 20 times more easily than ordinary tap water, but it it is also very, very thick (i.e., dense). Good thing because it’s also very, very small. How small is it? Think of a box (cube) where each edge is about an inch long. Is that how small it is? Not exactly. Now split that box up into 10 smaller boxes. Is that how small it is? Are we there yet? Then, split one of those smaller boxes into 10 even smaller boxes, and keep doing this until you’ve done it a total of 12 times. That’s how small it is and, yes, we’re there now! Talk about small portions! Of course, you could order a sandwich with your soup, but no need. A drop of Quark Soup weighs about 1,000 pounds. Oops, hold that sandwich and bring me a doggie-bag instead. Turns out, Quark Soup is heavier (the correct scientific term is “denser”) than anything else in the universe…except a black hole. So, Quark Soup is hot, slippery, and thick, but what does it taste like? Is it worth all the fuss? Who knows? No one’s ever tasted it. There were no people around 13 billion years ago to sample this concoction, and time travel has not been perfected yet. What about Long Island? The scientists at Brookhaven were watching their weight. A 1,000 pound drop of soup was the last thing they needed! However, there’s another problem: a single drop would vaporize your whole body – a heavy price to pay for a sip, however delicious it may be. So, there’s no way to know what Quark Soup tastes like, unless, of course, you ask Bobby Flay. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

< Back Pando “How are you at riddles? Let’s see!” David Cowles Riddle #1 : I’m black and white and red all over; what am I? Guess : A newspaper! Well, good try, but we don’t allow archaic constructions in this game, and nobody uses the word ‘newspaper’ anymore, so your answer is disallowed. (If we allowed ‘newspaper’, we’d have to allow Old English words from Beowulf , et al. and that would be quite messy.) Answer : A blushing zebra. Try again? Riddle #2 : I’m a living organism, I weigh 40 times more than a Blue Whale, and I’m at least 5,000 years old (but who’s counting?); what am I? Guess : A dragon? The Loch Ness Monster? The Blob? All good guesses but none correct. Answer : A Quaking Aspen. Get it? “A Quaking Aspen,” hilarious…right? Not so much? Well, no wonder; it’s not a joke. It’s a Quaking Aspen for pity’s sake! Not just any Quaking Aspen as it turns out; it’s a particular Quaking Aspen that answers to the name of, you guessed it, Pando . (Do all trees have proper names…or just this one? Do they know their own names like dogs and cats?) Being Pando : What’s it like being me? Well, I’m one tree, but I have more than 40,000 stems (you’d call them ‘trunks’). I cover 100 acres. And in case you were wondering, my pronouns are he and him , but my sexual orientation, sadly, is still unknown (I reproduce asexually). I’m 40,000 trunks, each trunk a clone of all the others, each tapping into a common root system, but each with its own bark, its own crown (foliage), its own lifecycle (not 5,000 years…maybe a few hundred), and each with its own personal survival challenges (weather, fire, predators, parasites, disease, human beings, etc.). So, what’s it like being Pando ? It is not easy to enter the intellectual life of a tree. There is little doubt that trees communicate with each other, recognize nuclear family members, care for the young, the sick and the elderly in their midst, and proactively share available resources (e.g., water). Nutshell : trees engage in eleemosynary behavior. Their motto: Do Ergo Sum . More than most members of a certain unnamed animal species I know well, they love their neighbors as themselves . But it is hard to imagine what sort of ideation accompanies this activity. Obviously, it would be non-verbal. The activity of trees seems clearly intentional…but is it conscious? To whatever extent Pando is ‘aware’, is that awareness solely at the level of the organism itself or is it distributed among its member off-shoots? Are we talking Federal Reserve (central bank) here…or are we talking Blockchain? (Lie quiet Hamilton, I mean that is Alexander Hamilton.) Or is it both? But back to Matthew : “Love your neighbor as yourself .” As yourself! ‘As’ is different from ‘like’. ‘Like X?’ I recognize the dignity and equality X (i.e., the other). ‘As X?’ I recognize myself in the other. For Pando , ‘as’ and ‘like’ are synonymous. Pando is simultaneously self and other. All of which brings us back to that “certain unnamed animal species” we met earlier. According to Jesus ( Matthew ), we are to love our neighbors as (not like) ourselves. Is that an ethical ideal? Or does it reflect an ontological reality? Am I Pando ? (Or at least Pando-like ?) Am I one among the 8 billion living stems of a single organism? (This has been an insight of mystics, East and West, for millennia.) Am I my sister as well as my sister’s keeper? Do I automatically do unto myself what I do unto others? On this site, we have repeatedly argued that reality is inherently recursive. Accordingly, we live in a universe with a curved (vs. flat) ontology – not ‘just’ a curved topology. Karma is real. It’s not a reaction to an action, it is embedded in the action itself. Well, food for thought all around. But whether we are Pando-like or not, we can agree that human beings have a lot to learn, not only from Pando , but from trees generally (trees which, BTW, share 50% of our DNA ). Share Previous Next